Yesterday was #followamuseum day on Twitter and the initial signs are that it was a success. The hashtag was used at least 6,000 times (I don’t think this is counting all the tweets as this service missed about 50 which I wrote myself) and the website received in excess of 10,000 unique visitors.
I want now to pause for a minute and ask you to share the number of new followers that your institution gained on follow a museum day and to ask what will you do next to engage with these people?
We started with 612 followers and ended with 641 (so + 29 ). This is many more than we would have expected to gain in a normal day (previously about +6 / week).
Re engagement I’ll continue tweeting our events, bits of office gossip and science news. We haven’t done anything special for this event (which I hadn’t heard of in advance) except for supporting it by using the hashtag.
We gained only around 17 followers, but then we’re not a museum or very big! I’ve already welcomed them, followed back the ones who seem interesting, deleted the spambots. They’ll have chance to win a teeny prize if they come into the gallery with a code word!
Very nice initiative…one for contemporary art galleries now please?!
PS @BStEGallery
Thanks for the idea and the initiative. Nationalmuseet got 4 new followers! Twitter is not (yet) widely spread in Denmark, and not many Danish museums tweet. We welcome our 4 new contacts, and look forward to many great conversations with them – and the others – in the future.
btw: you mention stats for use of the hash #followamuseum – I noticed, that some also used #followamuseumday (I accidently did it myself and discovered the “extra” tag that way)
Thanks for yesterday. We gained around 35 new followers. They are mainly other museums/galleries or arts initiatives. We will continue to work out the best way to engage with and grow the relationship with our followers.
We were very lucky so thank you Jim/the team, it’s much appreciated. Congrats on running a fine event.
As you’d probably expect @sciencemuseum gained a large number of new followers (we also offered a free annual membership to one new follower as an incentive to boost awareness of our membership scheme) so we finished 339 up on the day, around 300 more than a usual day.
@mediamuseum gained 75 (against 7-10 usually) and @railwaymuseum 41 (against 4-6 per day). So in essence there was 10 times the amount of traffic/new followers compared to a normal Monday!
However I agree that it all means nothing if we don’t engage with these followers in the near future – we’ll discuss this very issue today but it’ll be interesting to see what other institutions feel about this.
Thank you everyone for your links and your time, it’s very much appreciated!
A blog post about why #FollowAMuseum was a social media success found here : http://bit.ly/cqGlED
We got 56 new followers throughout the day, which was pretty incredible given that we started with 131. While a number of the new followers were fellow museums/institutions, the majority were individuals. Very happy indeed with the results.
Thanks a lot Jim for the great initiative!
We got 33 new followers yesterday (usually we get around 5 a day).
We welcomed all followers and followed them back. It is a real useful way to get in touch with your followers. You can easily follow what’s going on in their lifes and anticipate/engage. We invited all followers to ask their questions and join our weekly MuseumTwitterTour (@museumboerhaave #mbtrail Thursdays 15:00 CET).
And ofcourse I met new museums and colleagues worldwide! Which makes me a better informed museumprofessional.
Keep up the good work people!
Hi Jim,
#followamuseum day was a brilliant idea. Thank you very much for your effort, I like the website as well, simple and straight to the point, just like twitter.
We have gained 24 followers within a day. I think this is twice the number of our weekly average.
It was good for us because British Museum mentioned us as their partner, that created a few more tweets.
Do you think there will be value of having it every year? Arguably there might be some other social networking that works next year.
Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery @BM_AG gained 51 new followers on #followamuseum day, jumping from 522 followers to 573.
The West Midland Bird Club ( http://www.westmidlandbirdclub.com/ – I’m webmaster@ & we cover the English West Midland region) isn’t a museum, but @WMBirdClub gained about ten followers (5% increase) on the day; apparently just from being involved in discussion with local museums, about their natural history collections; and about birds seen at a local outdoor museum.
I’m now thinking of how this model could be re-applied in the nature conservation field.
@bcmuseums added approx 40 new followers as a result of #followamuseum day. This was much more than we would expect in a day.
We follow most of our followers back – we don’t follow companies that are just promoting their own products and which have no link at all to our museum or local area.
A lot of the new followers were other museums so we will be able to retweet appropriate tweets from these organisations to our followers which should help to promote the sector generally.
At the moment we are focusing on using twitter to drive traffic to our blog and our Flickr account and to ask for suggestions of what objects people would like to see images of or read articles about. We are also planning to do twitter challenges linked to Flickr such as ‘guess the mystery obect’. We also use twitter to alert followers to forthcoming events.
Hi Jim
Thanks so much for a great job yesterday.
We were blown away by getting over 300 new followers and hope we’ll deserve them! So I agree with Peer that attracting followers is one thing. To be honest, it’s not that hard – entertaining tweets, freebies and competition prizes are a great recipe for success. But having engaged followers is what we should all be aiming for. We’re working towards that and have a core of followers who are quite engaged, but we’re aiming for a far higher %.
Museums and galleries are nothing without our visitors (both real and virtual) and we need to value them and let them know we value them. If we’re going to get visitors to engage with us, we need to make sure we’re engaging with them. Our next step today is asking people on Twitter to tell us what they want from us. Their responses are going to be central to shaping what @NHM_London is going to do in the future.
It would be great to hear other people’s thoughts on this.
A
Congratulations Jim! We have the impression your initiative was a big success for a lot of museums worlwide.
And you’re right the question now is: “what will you do next to engage with these people?”
We keep in touch. Have a nice day.
Roger Busschots
Infofilm/Museum Media
Hi Jim
Yesterday was such a moral boost at the Freud Museum London! I started the museum’s Twitter account last week, and only had about 4 or 5 followers by the end of the week. We weren’t sure if it was going to be worth our time and effort to keep the account going if there were so few followers, but because of your initiative yesterday, we now have over 50! This number is still growing.
We are a very small museum, so I never expected to receive this many followers in one day. Even searching brought up many messages with our name in it, which was very encouraging.
Our next step will be to hopefully translate the new followers into admission tickets. Since Twitter is international, many of our followers live around the world, so we will also try to use Twitter to drive our online shop sales. We are also looking to keep our Tweets not only informative, but fun as well by Tweeting interesting facts and questions.
It was a brilliant idea, I’m sure all small museums (like us) saw a BIG boost. Many, many thanks.
Ned Loach
The Freud Museum London
Hi Jim
At the London Film Museum we started the day with 198 followers and ended on 212 so not a bad increase. We weren’t listed on the followamuseum list on the site but being involved with the discussion and hashtag helped up out.
We shall be looking forward to next year, especially as 1st February as also my birthday.
Congratulations.
Mark Best
London Film Museum
All of our Twitter accounts showed an increase. The idea really let me know who else in the museum world was using Twitter and, in some cases, Facebook. I’ve already marked the calendar for Feb 1st. I might do it more often.
Elizabeth Barker
Kalamazoo Valley Museum
We added 19 followers. It was a brilliant day!
Well done.
The @amhistorymuseum account gained 195 followers on Feb 1. We normally get about 20 new followers a day so that’s a 10x increase!
#followamuseum is a really fantastic idea… I don’t see why we couldn’t promote it on a monthly basis…it isn’t so different from #followfriday which happens every week. Each participating museum could recommend another museum to follow each week…just seeing the hashtag reminds people to send out their own recommendations.
In terms of engagement–we’re sending a public thank you tweet but don’t have plans to target our new followers in any different way than we treat the rest of our followers…something to consider for next time, I guess.
We added around 30 new followers and we found a few more friends to follow too!
This boost also took us past the 500 landmark – with a quirky gimmick of a free pen to our 500th follower!
We were thrilled to see an increase in mentions and to see the recommendations we were receiving! We also saw an increase to appear on around 10 more lists associated with history, museums, culture, heritage etc.
I remember when the idea was first mentioned and we were supportive from the beginning but it was managed it such a simple yet effective way with the easy to use lists on the accompanying website that I want to say congratulations and thank you for all the great work you do for museum marketing!
Looking forward to the next great idea and to getting to know our new followers – they have already given us some great ideas on what they want to see from us on Twitter – so expect more photos from us in the future and quirky facts!
One last thing – does it matter to our followers to know that I write the majority of our tweets or should we stay as PompeyDockyard as long as we remain approachable and non-corporate? hmmmm…….
@AvoncroftMuseum started yesterday with 43 followers, usually with a join rate of one or two new people a week. During the day we had an extra 15 people follow us, plus two more today. About half of these were people, the other half museums/charity groups/cultural institutions etc.
#followamuseum was fabulous, and we’d definitely get involved again. It was a great way to find out who else is out there, what they’re doing, and how we can improve what we’re doing.
So thanks!
Monday trends for new followers:
1/4 – 13
1/11 – 14
1/18 – 11
1/25 – 10
2/1 – 33!
We added +179 new followers, and had about three times as many @ replies and conversations as a typical Monday. It was a great campaign, and we are grateful to have been a part of it!
(Oh, and “we” means @thewomensmuseum)
Thanks again!
@weismanart received about 70 new followers yesterday. That’s about 10x as many as on a normal day. Thank you for making it happen!
Hi Jim,
Thanks for putting all of this together! @artinstitutechi has 260 new followers, which is about 10x as many as a typical Monday. I plan to talk to the new followers especially in the coming days to see what kind of information/conversation they are most interested in.
Glad to have been a part of this! Thanks again.
@walters_museum got approx. 20 new followers yesterday
Amazing what you acomplished from you computer, Jim. Seems like now we can move the World with the click of a mouse.
Consider one thing: over here in Mexico, asides from being Monday with most of museums closed, February 5th was also a Hollyday. Anyhow, #follosamuseum was among the mexican Trending Topics for most of the day.
Our Twitter account, @casachihuahua, gets an average of 4 or 5 new followers per day. We got 31 yesterday. Half of them from the city. We added them back and when they mentioned us, so we did with them.
To keep engagement, we will continue on our one-tweet-a-day basis, and on fridays we will launch an open question or opinion poll for our Twitter followers.
We gained almost 40 followers (that’s about 9% of our existing follower base), which were a mixture of other museum/heritage tweeters and individuals. I’ve followed back quite a few (but not all) of these – in the hope of opening up more conversations (rather than one-way communications) with people interested in the Museum and its work.
I think it was definitely a good way to point out to people that smaller museums are tweeting – but the real value is in building the ongoing relationship, and in integrating that with what happens on the ground in the physical Museum itself.
I would definitely like to echo a congrats and thank you for the wonderful initiative. The Museum of Biblical Art received 3 new followers (@MOBIAnyc)and we were able to find lots of great museums to follow ourselves.
Thought it was fantastic – additional 30 followers to Discovery Point and 18 to Verdant Works – and found loads of fantastic new tweeters to follow too!
Great to see what’s going on all over the world – well done – bit manic yesterday morning though!
We gained over 20 followers which was great, and we followed some new museums as well. A really great initiative – more like this please! Visit a museum day?!
Jim,
I think that the simple fact that a museum related topic was trending in spots all over the world was a very positive thing. Well done.
The Annapolis Heritage Society @odellmuseum gained 18 new followers which was a nice jump.
Hi Jim,
The Dutch Museum of National History (@nhm_nederland) had 40 new followers yesterday, whereas normally we have around 5/day. Also, I noticed that today we had slightly more new followers than usually.
We continue with our various participation programmes on Twitter, and I’ll be putting more focus on crowdsourcing small projects in the next few months. As always, I ask our new followers what they would like to hear from us and try to respond to their requests.
Thanks for the great initiative!
Yesterday we gained 63 new followers! On a typical day we get 5-10 new followers, so it was a great success for us! We also had several mentions and retweets that helped get people to follow us.
I love the idea of asking followers what they want to hear from us through our social media channels. I’m going to do that today!
Jim, a huge thanks for your work on this – now how can we make every day Follow a Museum Day?
I thought it was a great success and seemed to generate a lot of interest/discussion. People’s History Museum (@PHMMcr) got about 50-60 new followers yesterday which was great for us. Definitely keen to do something like this/similar again to help promote our sector via social media. Thanks for organising it!
The New Museum (@newmuseum) gained over 150 followers on Feb 1. This is a big increase for us, and we’re so appreciative for your efforts in coordinating such a fab initiative. We also found a bunch of museums to follow ourselves. Kudos!
@thehenryford gained 46 followers, a respectable number, and had some nice convos.
We added 40 followers yesterday, from 1,658 to 1698 followers. We usually average 2-5 per day. Agree with sciencemuseummn on asking followers what they want/need from us on social media sites. Working more on crowdsourcing as we build a follower base.
Hi Jim,
thanks again for a wonderful and successful initiative!
We welcomed 88 new followers @Stedelijk, where on a normal day we see an average of about 8…
Got in touch with a lot of nice colleagues yesterday, and had some great conversations with both old and new followers..
Thought yesterday was a great idea, and it worked really well! We gained 60 followers yesterday (we usually average 2-5 a day), which is 15% of our totaly number of followers. Also found some interesting galleries and museums to follow from other people’s recommendations. Really enjoyable day all round – great buzz, and real sense of community and comraderie amongst museums and galleries, and their fans/visitors. Thank you!!
The concept was great, as well as the implementation! Now if only us tweeting museum professionals could gain some more followers.
@thelittleartist
Thank you, Jim, for the initiative!
It was nice all day receiving and sending recommendations and gaining and talking to new followers.
We welcomed 109 @museupicasso new followers, when on an average day it goes about 10!! (we are still on the taking off phase, having started our Twitter acount on November’09).
Huge thanks to all of you, organisers, followers and colleagues for such an exciting #followamuseum day!!!!
All the best
Conxa
Follow A Museum was a great boOOost for the museums world, weary with recession, shrinking budgets if not shrinking staff. And thinking : ‘how can we please the people’ on this bad run?
Suddenly, through this day, the museums were ‘a happening’, an event, the places to be. They had through their tweeters a personality whereas before they were a name. And the staff on the ground, in the museums space, walk today with a spring in their step. And hopefully tomorrow and the after too. From Cumbria in England where I am, to Canada and all around the (Museum) World, going by your tweeters and the public response : an arousal.
A museum “Mexican wave” (a football dynamic) has been created. KEEP IT GOING!
Stuart Roy Clarke, The Homes of Football (museum) , The Lake District, England.
We got exactly 50 new followers yesterday at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (@mbamtl) which is about ten times what we usually get in a day.
I was suprised to see that #followamuseum caught on so quickly amongst French speakers (about 90% of our twitter followers are French speakers so we mainly tweet in French)
Several journalists and media outlets in Québec participated, which was nice.
All in all, a great day and a great initiative!
Marianne
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
I had only a short time to devote to #followamuseum, but we still saw a nice bump in followers. Also, I was exposed to many new museums and began following plenty of them. Since Twitter is as much back channel industry/trade buzz as it is a way for us to communicate with followers, this was a win-win. Thanks, and great job!
Congratulations and thank you so much for facilitating the day. We just started our twitter account a week and a half ago. The day really helped us increase our numbers quickly with an addition of 30 followers.
We also really enjoyed seeing and getting to know all the other museums and galleries that are online around the world.
We look forward to your initiative towards increasing awarness for facebook fan pages.
Thanks again
@TheTomThomson
Tom Thomson Art Gallery, Owen Sound, Ontario
@DallasMuseumArt gained 77 followers yesterday–most of them from other countries (which is great!) We also had about 10x the typical amount of mentions and @replies!
Thanks for organizing a great day!
Had a ball yesterday, and thank you for making it all happen!
Up by 12 followers, usually 2-ish per day. Made sure to welcome all newbies personally; most replied and seemed to be delighted with personal welcome…
Determined to keep up “meaningful” engagement, in addition to everything else we’ve been doing!